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Wednesday, February 26, 2014

The New Samsung Galaxy S5

The Samsung Galaxy S5 is official. The handset itself is bigger and has a 5.1 in Super AMOLEDhy1920 x 1080 pixel display.

Inside A LOT of new technology and sensors, there’s a fingerprint scanner located inside the Home button, and a heart rate monitor on the back just under the camera port. The handset is also water and dust resistant with IP67 certification.

Specs; Hardware

Samsung has bumped up the processing power, added in a slightly larger 5.1 in display and kept the RAM at 2GB. Internal storage is the standard 16/32GB.

Samsung appears to have made the same mistake with storage that it made with the Galaxy S4. The 16GB Galaxy S4 only had around 9GB of user-available storage by the time TouchWiz had muscled in on things, but now with the 16GB Galaxy S5 that's down to 7.86GB, according to Android Central.

It innclude support for 128GB microSD cards, plus super-fast connectivity with global LTE support and Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac HT80, MIMO (2x2). Samsung has also included something called “download booster” which leverages both LTE and Wi-Fi connections to speed up sizeable downloads of over 30MB.

The battery is still removable,And Samsung's new Ultra Power Saving mode, where the display reverts to black and white when your battery gets below 10%, is likely to ensure you get even more juice from the S5.

The big changes, or the one’s Samsung wants you to take notice of, are under the hood or hidden in plain sight. Things like the fingerprint scanner, heart rate monitor and improved imaging and super fast network connectivity are the “Big Talking Points” according to Samsung. Whether consumers feel that way, however, is another thing entirely.

Camera:

The Galaxy S5 looks to takes thing a step further with the introduction of a 16MP sensor and Selective Focus, a feature which allows you to adjust the focus of a shot after the image has been taken just like you can do aboard Nokia’s new Lumia handsets and the famed Lytro camera. Samsung has also improved the auto-focus speed, too – you now only have to wait 0.3 seconds – meaning rapid capture is on the cards.

There’s also HDR Live mode – a means of previewing an image with full HDR processing applied to it before you’ve actually captured the image. All the usual Galaxy camera app settings we know and love are present and accounted for too, as well as few added extras like Virtual Tour Shot and Shot & More. The Galaxy S5 can also shoot video in 4K – 3840 x 2160 pixels – resolution, although if you’re going to be doing a lot of this it’s probably worth investing in a 64GB or even 128GB microSD card.

FingerPrint Scanner:

Like the iPhone 5s, the Samsung Galaxy S5 also features a fingerprint scanner. Biometrics are going to be big in 2014 and from the looks of things Apple and Samsung are, once again, going to be leading the charge. Unlike Apple’s TouchID, however, Samsung’s fingerprint scanner will be open for mobile payments (via PayPal) from the get-go, as well as providing a quick and easy way to safely and securely unlock the handset.

Samsung also confirmed the Gear Fit, a new type of fitness band that can be used – much like the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo – to monitor your fitness levels. The Gear Fit features a curved Super AMOLED display that, when connected to your Galaxy S5, will send notifications through to your wrist. It’s sort of like an advanced Nike FuelBand that also hooks up to S-Health and the sensors aboard the Galaxy S5.